Erwin Bohatsch: Charim Galerie.

It is not exactly easy to renounce "content" in this age of restive realism, when every image is its own screenplay. Doing without political, social, or economic symbolism, foreclosing any reference to an object, means dependence on only the most primal code of painting: on the materiality and texture of the pigment and its support. "The image itself says nothing," says Erwin Bohatsch, a purist through and through. "It is a flat object."

In the early '80s, Bohatsch was considered one of the Neue Wilde (new savages), the "impassioned" painters especially celebrated in Austria, Germany, and Italy. He soon departed from this neo-expressionist style, with its symbol-laden imagery, ,and front then on worked to rid the painted surface of all figuration, narration, and expressivity. Today Bohatsch is a poster child for abstraction, a key player on the analytical-painting team. His latest exhibition was a collection of recent paintings intended to call attention to a different conception of virtuosic draftsmanship. And increased attention is the precondition for extracting visual experience from Bohatsch's subtle calibrations. On the one hand, there were spare, almost monochromatic paintings in which the color develops in the process of application. Bohatsch paints these by spreading various shades of brown-gray and white oil paint, thinned with synthetic resin, with a broad brush or spatula on a horizontally propped canvas. By tipping the canvas, he creates runs that flow lethargically across the surface. The emptied forms that appear through this process skirt the margins of visibility. The artist's hand and even the painting process and physicality seem to vanish from the picture. Transparent veils without a front or back: abstraction as loss or as extreme compression?

In the last year, though, Bohatsch has been indulging in a stronger palette again. In dry-brushed layers of bright pigments, radiant and lively tones suggest the dampness of colors just soaked into canvas. Differences of light and dark convey the impression of spatial depth, and the pictorial surfaces achieve a certain terseness, especially in the contrast-rich black-and-white paintings. These new paintings provoke neither bafflement nor astonishment, but rather convey clarity and energy, change and transformation. They are, like most good paintings, relaxed, looking as if they took no effort to produce. What they possess in high quantity is authenticity. They come from the experience of the artist, from his unerring sense for experiment, from his unusual way of looking at problems, from his palpable trust in his medium.

Bohatsch does not need realism, for, like Gerhard Richter, he understands painting as a specific reality produced by a process, by the work on the image. He stands by his medium, stubborn and steadfast, and calmly lets the seductions of postmodernism pass him by. Staying steadily within the parameters of the chosen format of the canvas panel is a strict discipline, adherence to which seems positively heroic today. In the glitz and glamour of polymorphous art worlds at the brink of pandemonium, where each gigabyte of art strives to outdo all others, these quiet, systematic studies in painting are a special kind of spiritual exercise.

Translated from German by Sara Ogger.